The Time I Donated My Eggs

I have biological offspring, I think.

The Auntie Bulletin is two years old! Happy birthday to us! I want to get to today’s actual post about the time I donated my eggs, but since we’ve hit a milestone, I also want to take this opportunity to fill you in on where things are with my disability benefit. It’s good news! Also, there’s an anniversary sale below!

So, a little over a year ago, my long-term disability benefit was discontinued. This wasn’t a government benefit, but rather a standard benefit provided by my employer when I became disabled. It was a huge financial lifeline for me when I realized I couldn’t work full time anymore and had to leave teacher education. In August 2025, my long-term disability provider sent me a letter letting me know I was no longer disabled because I hadn’t been going to enough doctor’s appointments. (In reality, I hadn’t been going to as many medical appointments as I once had because my doctors had run out of stuff to try; plus, I was really burned out on medical appointments).

I had recently been writing in this newsletter about my financial anxieties as a person without children, including this post called “Interdependence is My New Retirement Plan,” where I’d declared my intention to stop worrying so much about money, take care of my people, and trust that, when needed, people would take care of me. When suddenly my main source of income was cut off, I felt like maybe I should trust in my own plan, so I let Auntie Bulletin readers know I’d lost my disability benefit and asked if you’d be willing to upgrade to a paid subscription. Nearly 60 people did, which was such a humbling, beautiful boost of love and confidence in our willingness to take care of one another.

Not long afterward – based partly on wise advice from several Auntie Bulletin readers – I hired a lawyer and appealed the insurance company’s decision. My lawyer instructed me to stop writing about the situation in public, so I did.

And now, good news: many months and tons of paperwork later, we won the appeal! My attorney did an excellent job communicating that disability is not defined by the quantity of one’s medical appointments. My benefit was reinstated, and I received back pay. Going forward, I’ll receive a monthly check, minus attorney’s fees and an offset representing 50% of my earnings as a writer (which is, admittedly, an annoying bummer. It means that for every $7 monthly subscription I earn, $3.50 of that gets taken out of my benefit check).

I’d like to report that financial fear is no longer a reality in my life, but alas. A few weeks ago was the 12 month anniversary of the post where I asked everyone to upgrade, and with it came a few dozen people who didn’t renew their paid annual subscriptions. (I’ve learned that’s called a subscriber cliff).

The truth is I’ve been dragging my feet about telling you of my benefit reinstatement because I have worried that even more people would stop paying for my newsletter. But so many people showed up for me, or just sent me nice notes, when I lost my benefit, and I know lots of people are out there caring about what happens to me, and I wanted you all to know that I do have an income stream that’s been restored. I am so grateful to everyone who helps to sustain this newsletter and supports me to keep doing this work.

In honor of two years, in gratitude for your support, (and in craven hopes that you might upgrade), The Auntie Bulletin is currently 40% off, which is the biggest discount I’ve ever done. Sale ends this coming Monday, Sept 7, which is Labor Day in the US.

Okay, enough of all that. Let me tell you about the time I donated my eggs.

Now Let’s Get to It

When I was 24, I donated my eggs to a family who wanted to have a baby. I was paid $4000, and I did it for the money. This was in 2004.

Today I’m writing about my experience donating eggs more than 20 years ago, and although I’d like to include some kind of message about reproductive justice (because reproductive care is important, and people of all genders should be able to access the care they need to build a family in the way they want to), really what I’m writing about is the subjective experience of having once upon a time been an egg donor, and the continuing experience of knowing I likely have at least one biological offspring out there somewhere.

Which is a particularly niche trip. I am not a parent, not a mother, although I love many other mothers’ children. As I have often written, as an auntie I receive the benefit of having beloved children in my life, but without the cost and labor of parenthood. But at the same time – and I can go years without thinking about this – I am a success by evolutionary standards. I have reproduced. My biological offspring exist and, like Celine Dion’s heart, my DNA will go on. Maybe, if I’m lucky, I’ll even get to meet them one day.

The backstory is, a lot of the spending money I’d had during undergrad I earned by being a medical test subject. I participated in a series of trials that were mostly about drug interactions between heart medications and opioid painkillers. I’d show up at the university medical center early in the morning, spend all day in a hospital bed high on codeine or similar, repeat the same thing a few weeks later, and after several such study days, receive a check for several hundred dollars. I travelled a lot during college, and this is largely how I paid for it. (I told my parents, but perhaps not, as I recall, about the opioid painkiller part).

So when I started graduate school in 2004, I was accustomed to renting out my body for scientific and medical purposes. If you’re around my age, maybe you recall that local alternative print weeklies back then often included classifieds on the back page – and there were usually one or two ads for egg donors. According to a classified ad in The Stranger, I could be paid $4000 for my trouble. I was broke, I met the age requirement (21-29 years old), and I wasn’t squeamish. I applied to a (now defunct) Florida-based agency called Loving Donation and they sent me an application by mail.

The application was super long. They wanted lots of photographs: current photos and photos of me as a baby and a child, as well as photographs of my biological family members. They asked about my education, my grades, participation in clubs and athletics and volunteering, my hobbies and interests, where I’d travelled, what I would bring to a desert island. They asked what books and movies I liked, and I had a lot to say about that. I was very into Willa Cather back then, and Vladimir Nabokov and Heinrich Böll and Graham Greene. I’d majored in film studies and had worked, during undergrad, at Seattle video rental mecca Scarecrow Video. I knew a lot about movies.

They also asked for my health history, which was mostly uncomplicated at that time. It would be decades before hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos syndrome caught up with me. My grandfather had had cancer by then, but he was in his 70s – not much worry for prospective parents seeking an egg donor. But there was one big red flag in my family’s health history, which was that my younger brother Donald had been bipolar, and had died by suicide the year before. I thought this would likely disqualify me in the eyes of prospective egg recipients, and I was young and self-centered, so I didn’t disclose Donald’s mental illness or death. I lied that everything I’d written was true and complete to the best of my knowledge, signed my name, and mailed the application back to Florida. A few weeks later, my profile and photos were added to Loving Donations’ password-protected directory of prospective donors.

I did get caught out in the lie, and we’ll come back to that, but first I need to tell you about this prospective donors directory, because aunties, it was a trip. It was several pages, really, with maybe 20 young women per page. There’d be a photo (but no name), the donor’s age, and a few fun facts about her hobbies or SAT scores or college major or whatever. If a prospective recipient liked the look of a donor, they could request the full profile.

When I got access to the donor database, I was so taken aback. It seemed that every prospective donor was thin, blonde, and majoring in communications. They all played volleyball.

Then there was me: artsy, redheaded, freckled, and (to my mind at the time, LOLOLOL) chubby. Sports: none. I remember scrolling through and thinking, “I guess this is another one of those life situations where you’re supposed to be a sorority-type person. Count me out, I guess.”

(In retrospect, there is so much to say here about race and ethnicity and ability and eugenics. But I wasn’t thinking about any of that back then).

A few months later, I got picked.

I don’t know how things are with egg donations today, but in 2004 at least, with my agency at least, anonymity was paramount. Loving Donation impressed upon me again and again that my identity would be protected, and also that under no circumstances was I to try to figure out who the recipients of my eggs might be. Communications between donor and recipient went exclusively through the agency, with our names always removed.

But I did receive some information about the couple who selected me. They were a straight couple in the Bay Area (the geography couldn’t be hidden, because I needed to fly to a clinic near them for the actual donation). One or both of them had red hair, so they wanted a redheaded donor. They liked my long list of beloved books, and that I’d included several foreign films among my faves. It turned out not everybody wanted a sorority type after all.[[1]]

It was at this point that somebody at the agency reviewed my medical records and saw where I’d been talking with my physician about my brother’s death by suicide. The agency reached out to me, diplomatically: “By any chance, did you fail to mention that your brother was bipolar and killed himself at age 16, and also is there any more of that kind of thing in your family?” I was caught, so I figured I ought to also tell them about my grandfather’s bipolar disorder and about the uncle who had also died by suicide. I was sure my family’s mental health history, plus my dishonesty about it, meant the couple who had picked me would back out and I wouldn’t get to earn $4000. I felt bad about lying, but perhaps not as bad as I should have. As an auntie in 2026 who loves a lot of families and empathizes more fully with what it means to fear for one’s children, my lie of omission feels despicable. Back then, I mostly just wanted the money.

The couple who wanted my eggs thought about it for a while and decided to go ahead with the donation anyway. I don’t know why. I hope their children are happy and healthy and thriving and nobody is suffering or suicidal – let’s come back to that later.

Now it was time to sign the contract: a stack of paper an actual inch thick. They mailed it to me, thankfully, because otherwise I would’ve had to use up my whole quarter’s allotment of printing at my university library. There must have been more to the agreement, which I now can’t recall, but the big upshot was this: I promised to never, ever, ever try to find the recipients of my eggs and to never, ever, ever lay claim to any children that might result. I was like, “cool, no problem,” and signed. The recipients signed a similar contract in which they promised to never, ever, ever try to find me and to never, ever, ever attempt to abandon their future children to my care. Presumably, they too were like, “cool, no problem,” and signed, because soon after that it was time for me to fly to Palo Alto for my first fertility clinic visit.

The people at the clinic gave me a checkup and talked me through what would happen. Here’s what I remember: first we would need to sync up my reproductive cycle with that of the donation recipient, and then we would make my ovaries produce a bunch of eggs at once. In the event, I spent three or four weeks giving myself daily hormone injections, then flew back to California for the actual retrieval.

Okay, but first a funny (??) side story about the hormone injections. They’d given me the full month’s supply supposedly, but after like a week, I ran out. I called the clinic. They were like, “Sometimes the vial just looks like it’s running low when it isn’t.” I was like, “No, it’s fully out.” They were like, “What dose have you been taking?” and I was like, “ten milligrams,” and they were like, “Um, you were supposed to be taking ONE milligram.” So that was one of the dumber mistakes of my life. They took a day or two to deliberate whether I’d screwed everything up for the egg retrieval (and probably also to shake their heads at my towering stupidity), but then they decided it was okay and sent me some more drugs.

I had one major side effect of massively overdosing myself with hormones, which was that my memory was shot all to hell for a couple of weeks. I finished a term paper on Willa Cather and forgot to turn it in – as in, it was done, it was printed out, but I spaced on delivering it to my prof’s departmental mailbox – and she thought I was lying, and I had to get a doctor’s note saying I had temporarily destroyed my own memory. The professor relented. It was a good Cather paper.

So anyway, I flew to Palo Alto for the retrieval. I had to get there a couple of days early so they could give me the medication 36 (?) hours in advance to make all the eggs mature at exactly the right time for the retrieval appointment.

The morning of, I took a Valium and a cab to the clinic. They gave me a local anaesthetic and did the retrieval. I remember the room was dimmed. I remember an ultrasound machine. I remember that the retrieval itself took ten or fifteen or maybe twenty minutes. I remember that it hurt, not excruciatingly, but about as much as it hurts (for me) to have an IUD placed or removed: very strong cramps. Maybe a 4 out of 10. Toe curling, deep breathing, trying to keep relaxing your muscles kind of pain, but not panicky pain. Then it was over. They let me know they’d retrieved 25 eggs, which was, apparently, very impressive. Then they put me back in a cab and sent me back to my hotel and I slept the rest of the day. The next day, I flew home, and a couple of weeks later I received, by mail, a check for $4000.

That was pretty much it. I indicated I’d be open to donating again, but I never heard from them. I suspect that between the lying and the screwing up my medication and the scary mental illness in my family’s medical history, I was not an attractive repeat donor (25 impressive eggs notwithstanding).

I did get one more message, though. A year or so after the donation, I received a note from Loving Donation saying the recipients of my eggs had written me a card. It included information about the outcome of their IVF process. Did I want to receive this card?

Heck yes! So the agency sent the card along, and it was lovely. I wish I saved it. The parents let me know they were expecting a baby soon. They probably said they were grateful, but whatever, I did it for the money. Yet I found I was so pleased. I found myself wishing them all the joy and happiness and love and wellbeing in the world, hoping so fervently that their child would thrive and they could have as many more kids as they wanted – not that it occurred to me to write them back and say so. I wish I had.

Years later, dear friends of mine would conceive their two children by sperm donor, and I would learn about parents’ curiosity about the strangers whose genetic material lives on in their kids. Because of course they’re curious – how could they not be?

And lord, I’m curious, too. I signed that thick contract saying I would never seek out the family, and the parents signed their own contract saying they would never try to find me. But not long after the donation, a friend of mine pointed out that there’s at least one concerned party who didn’t sign a contract: the child.

For over two decades, I have wondered whether (okay, hoped that) one day, maybe, a young person might come find me. I have always pictured them cold knocking on my door, despite the fact that nobody does that anymore except political canvassers and pest control companies. I picture opening the door to a young redheaded person and just… recognizing them. I imagine being like, “‘It’s you! Hooray!” and inviting them in for a cup of tea and, soon, suggesting that everyone in their family meet everyone in mine.

I do not wish, at all, to be anyone’s parent – any children born of my eggs have parents already, and I hope their family is very, very happy and well – but I sure would be thrilled to add more kin. There’s always room for more family, chosen, biological, or the gray area in between, which after all is how so much of family and kinship has always worked, for all of human history. And I am a really good auntie.

Well, and so I never imagined I’d have a public platform where I might put out announcements to the universe, but here we are, so why not?

So that’s my story, aunties. That’s the end of it – for now. Thanks for reading, and thanks for being with me as we build this community where we’re all thinking together about how to gather in our kin. Let’s keep going.

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[[1]]: I’m happy to report that, in the intervening twenty years, I’ve learned to be less threatened by thin women who play sports. I noticed, eventually, that some of my best friends fall into this category, and I like them, and I started to wonder if maybe my specific friends weren’t simply anomalies among thin athletic women, but if in fact the population of thin athletic women might contain as many multitudes as does the population of chubby redheads. Ah, the wisdom of age!